A connection to place

I think we’ve all known special places that have deep meaning for us personally.

 Maybe we don’t always recognize it at the time.  There are several natural places that are special to me, but those with the deepest roots are woven from my childhood memories.  Colors and shapes, smells and sounds, and textures like the tactile velvet of new buds or flaking limestone. 

 The memories stay vivid and strong – some more so, some less.  Most of them comforting, but some, not so much.   They speak of my relationships with nature.  They are both known and unknown, some barely lurking within my subconscious.  What I remember most are not the events, but the feelings those connections gave me.

 

Maple leaves, owl feather, hickory nuts, and wild grape.

This is a small nature sketch done years ago, somewhere in the mid-1980s, of things collected on a walk through Iowa woods.  It was mid-autumn, and the season gave me treasures and a near infinity of browns and buff, with splashes of red and yellow.  Along the trail: leaves on limb and ground, sticks and branches and trunks and bark, seeds and frost-bitten fruits, empty acorn caps and sometimes a glimpse of gritty green. 

 The woods I rambled in are located in upper northeast Iowa, along a limestone ridge and bluff above a river.   It is a place of meditation, of quietness threaded with birdsong.   This is also a connection to a point in time.  Fall is a favorite season of mine; it feels like an important transition somehow, and I sometimes catch my breath waiting for the next thing to come.

It feels like a time to let life unwind, and a place to rest and heal. 

A sacred place.

 

Media:
Paper - unknown mass-produced watercolor paper pad, about 8x10"
Watercolor paint, probably Grumbacher and/or Winsor & Newton
     (the colors still surprisingly bright after almost 40 years)
Craft brushes
# 2 Pencil

Fall in the Fakahatchee

You can click on any image above to view larger.

Last Saturday, we met at the blue Harmon Building on Janes Scenic Drive within the Fakahatchee Strand Preserve State Park.  From this starting point, we could choose a number of possible sketching locations.  Across the road is Lake Gloria, named after the wife of the former landowner.  The lake was created years ago when it was dug for roads and construction.

The door to the Harmon Building.

I chose to sketch the back extension of Lake Gloria, which formed a pond bounded by cypress, cattails, and a grassy area filled with blooming and seeding goldenrod.  A perfect day for sketching, with the sun warming my back, and a cool breeze ruffling the lake and my sketchbook pages.

Monarch and Gulf Fritillary butterflies  flitted between Spanish needles, goldenrod and a tiny purple morning glory (Ipomoea triloba? ) straggling over the rocky ground below my feet near the lake’s edge.  A little blue heron kept vigil from a nearby young cypress tree, flying back and forth from the far edge of the lake to the tree, keeping an eye on me.  Was I friend or foe?    

Little blue heron.

Black vulture feather?

Black vultures circled around and around in a distinctive kettle pattern over the cypress dome, and a pair of kingfishers swooped though the air playfully chittering to each other.  The heat of the sun brought out that unique earthy fragrance of freshwater lakes.  The clear blue sky slowly filled with clouds ahead of the oncoming front, breathing a gentle softness over the skin.  The light changed again and again within two hours, as I struggled to capture what I could.

November is filled with subtle colors here – the rusty sienna of bald cypress needles ringing the pond contrast with the bright greens of shrubs and grasses.  Cattail stands are silvery white, golden brown, and green, all at the same time.  The grassy space to my right was filled with a range of yellow, gold, and brown as tall stands of sturdy goldenrod alternately bloomed and went to seed. 

The pond’s surface changed constantly with the light and the wind – first a mirror to the blue sky, then the reflective browns and greens of the foliage around the edge, then tannin-stained clearness in the shallows, revealing rocks and the hulking shapes of gar fish and darting minnows.  Dragonflies floated on the breeze, moving aimlessly from cattail to rock to grass tip.

White pelicans!

In the early afternoon we were treated to a rare sight: a group of over three dozen white pelicans searching for a spot to land.  I learned from the ranger with us that white pelicans seldom come this far inland this time of year, usually preferring nearby coastlines.  We speculated that the upcoming front perhaps drove them this far into the center of the state.  Whatever the reason, it was an amazing sight, and the perfect end to a perfect sketching day!

The fall colors of the Fakahatchee, along the bank of Lake Gloria.

The sketch was done in my:

Aquabee Super Deluxe  spiral-bound sketchbook
9x6 in, (22.86 x 15.24 cm), 93 lb. paper,
Sakura Micron Pigma pen 01, Niji waterbrush,
and Faber-Castell Aquarelle watercolor pencils.

Sketching at Fakahatchee

Fakahatchee field trip

This past Saturday, I had the opportunity to visit the Fakahatchee Strand Preserve State Park again as part of the En Plein Air event for April. This trip, we visited a disused remnant of Old U.S. 41 (also known as the Tamiami Trail), just north of the newer road. The remnant of road borders a canal and looks out over a marsh prairie habitat. As we traveled down the old road, a swallow-tailed kite swooped overhead, diving low enough for me to glimpse bright eyes and feather details.

We stopped at an old concrete bridge where the vista opened up. This part of the park has a different feeling from the cypress strands I visited before; the sky seems to extend infinitely above a vast expanse of grasses. It was a sunny day, and warm, with a breeze that kept the mosquitoes and some of the deerflies away.

Two of us settled down to draw and paint our surroundings, after our Park Ranger guide showed us some potential spots. Our choices included a buttonwood forest at the end of the road, an open canal lined with cattails, a variety of roadside shrubs and trees, and the prairie marsh. Our guide joined us to sketch after conducting more participants to our location. One of them included a flautist, and we enjoyed her music as it mingled with the wind rustling the grasses and dry palm fronds. What a wonderful experience!

Our explorations yielded some interesting discoveries: an empty Florida apple snail shell, black vulture feathers scattered along the roadside, a water snake shedding its skin, and a wooden framework under the concrete bridge, which may have been the original structure. We saw green buttonwoods, wax myrtles, red mangroves, airplants (Tillandsia utriculata), a snowy egret, great blue heron, turkey and black vultures, and a raccoon ambling across the mud flats under the cattails.

It was a beautiful day, and a happy accident that our planned plein air sketching coincided with the 31st Worldwide SketchCrawl. If you’d like to see photos from the past art events at Fakahatchee, please click on the events tab just under the top banner. A warm thank you to everyone who joined us!

You can click on the caption of the top image to view it on my Flickr photostream.

Things from my yard

Things from my yard, originally uploaded by Elizabeth Smith.

There is never a shortage of subject matter in nature! These found items represent microcosms of life and activity.

The oak branch and acorn are from a live oak tree (Quercus virginiana) - food and shelter to squirrels, birds, and insects, not to mention support for various lichens and mosses.

The passionvine (Passiflora suberosa) is a native that is continually popping up in my yard; it's a larval food for butterflies in our area such as the Gulf Fritillary and the Julia. I'm pretty sure songbirds eat the berries, and maybe some other critters, too.

Slash pine needles are everywhere on the ground. Each winter the pine trees seem to shed quite a few. I see them turning up in fallen bird's nests, such as this nest I sketched after a pouring rain knocked it down.

I'm not sure if anything eats the necklace pod (Sophora tomentosa) seeds, but I know that bees and butterflies love the nectar from it's bright yellow pea-like flowers.

Lately, it seems that mourning dove feathers are becoming a common occurrence. Are they molting this time of year? Maybe we just have more moving into the area, or perhaps the neighbor cat has been busy.

Fossil shells are fairly common in Florida. This one probably arrived in a load of fill, but it perfectly symbolizes the fact that our part of Florida was once an underwater ecosystem.

I picked these up at first just to draw them as interesting objects in themselves, but somehow the process of drawing and reflection opened up a whole new world. I think I could explore my entire yard and still not fully understand the little worlds within!

You can click on the image above to view it larger on my Flickr photostream.